Time to begin anew?

Probably, since I need some practice writing.

The Malayan Emergency

First, courtesy of Karin and the Facebook newsfeed:

Malaysian massacre ‘under review’

A useful addition to the narrative that was propounded in our textbooks – when we were still in school, so long ago! – which emphasised the success of British government efforts in driving out the faceless Communist enemy in the jungles, which ultimately paved the way for the creation of modern Singapore – successful, wealthy, English-speaking. What does it tell us?

First off, that war is very ugly – particularly counter-insurgency, where there is so little to differentiate the combatants from the civilians. It’s not surprising in the very least that there were atrocities and lots of people died – which is a point often glossed over in our modern presentations of this era.

Second, that any attempt to make history a play with heroes on one side and villains on the other is ultimately silly. On one side are the well-meaning (albeit paternalistic) colonial administrators facing a faceless threat in the jungle which emerges every now and then to kill plantation owners and destroy property. On the other are idealistic men and women who gave up relatively safe and secure lives for an existence of grubbing for tubers in the jungle like hunted animals, fighting an exploitative and extractive Power which promised to deny their (Chinese) communities political rights and offered (as yet) no plans to alleviate social and economic inequality.

And then there are village collaborators with either side, the civilian population. Chin Peng received honours from Lord Mountbatten on the V-Day parade and Communists and British had known each other and were good comrades not just that long ago… And then you realise there really aren’t two sides – or any sides – at all.

Third, that therefore the past is as messy and confusing as the present, if not more so because we’re not up to date on it at all. History, as the construction of hypothetical models to account for the survival and placement of extant sources, is inevitably a simplification. Textbook history, which is a particular distillation of academic history to serve the policy ends of the nation-state, is even more so. Certain narratives are privileged: how we got to be where we are, the building of a certain model of nation. The past is thus used specifically for the service of a narrow end in the present; niggling details which don’t get in. Often the textbooks tell us quite as much about the present – and probably much more truthfully – than about the past.

For instance, the New Villages relocation scheme, for instance, must have been extremely dislocative – one minute you’re in an open kampung, the next in a barbed wire compound surrounded by watchtowers. But because you don’t write policy papers, few people really know your point of view. But we do learn all about the ‘hearts and minds’ policy and how successful it was – well it must have been, because the British won.

Fourth, the cliche that history is written by the winners. Or, more accurately, the winners impose their version of history. Yet an article like this offers some hope of reprieve – maybe in the long run, it is those who manage to write history who are the winners.

Wealth and secularisation

Ahah – I have finally found the article I’ve been looking for on wealth and secularisation:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/secularism

And of course I’ve updated the link on my previous post on religion.

This article is also noteworthy on its optimism (from a liberal/secular POV) that religious fanaticism and religiosity is in fact in decline worldwide, aided by the spread of ‘Enlightenment ideas’. Well the Enlightenment is a hugely complex phenomenon… but let’s not go there (yet). I’m not sure I agree with all of it, though; and at the same time, while it’s true that secularism (and individual godlessness) has never been so prevalent – or at least so obvious – at any point in history, the picture differs from country to country and region to region.

The End of Christian America?

Here’s an interesting article I picked up from somewhere on the interwebs.

The End of Christian America (John Meacham, Newsweek 4/4/09)

This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory… the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent… Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million.

The decline of Christian affiliation in America is a phenomenon which has been noticed by many for some time. As with all surveys which ask for a personal response, such figures should be read with some caution: e.g. the rise of the numbers of nonbelievers may be due to the declining social stigma associated with the word ‘atheism’, and the respondents’ understanding of religion and religious labels are varied and can be very unorthodox (just to take one example, survey results show that there are more French people professing to be Catholic than there are French people believing in God – any God.)

What is rather more certain is that the number of adherents to Evangelical Christianity, the social stronghold of the right wing in America, is in decline – as measured in terms of church attendance rates. So it is quite probable that the figures tell us something more than just the social acceptability of disbelief, and illustrate perhaps a real change in religious attitudes. Confusingly, however,

A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that “these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs…’

Possibly this is related to the persistence or resurgence of fundamentalists and charismatics. So there is some cause for worry for liberals and unbelievers at least that debates concerning religion and its role in the public sphere may remain highly polarised, especially with the loss of the middle ground of moderate Protestantism.

What I find more interesting about this article, however, is where it relates to history. (Haha, surely you saw that coming!) First, the bits with which I disagree:

Religious doubt and diversity have, however, always been quintessentially American… The American culture of religious liberty helped create a busy free market of faith: by disestablishing churches, the nation made religion more popular, not less.

While I don’t pretend to know too much about American history, I am fairly certain that this statement is a gross simplification. While it is certainly true that the Founding Fathers were of diverse religious opinions (and many of the more famous ones, like Franklin, were deists in the good English Radical tradition) and the Constitution protects liberty of conscience, America is also the country of 17th century New England Quakers being whipped for not going to church, of the Salem witch hunts, the Prohibition, the persecution of Mormons, and the Scopes monkey trial. So alongside a tradition of religious diversity is also one of – often popularly inspired – religious fanaticism and intolerance of diversity in belief. America is just too big a country with too long a history for any opinion on religion to be ‘quintessential’. (However, because history is a site of political contest, a writer of liberal persuasion would claim religious liberty as quintessentially American, and be on firm constitutional ground while doing so.)

The claim that America owes its current religiosity to religious liberty (as opposed to European states, with state-established/supported churches) is one which is often made but not, in my opinion, well-supported. What is certain is that the ‘free market of faiths’ allow for Americans to switch religious allegiances very rapidly over their lifetimes, and there is some justifiable speculation as to how much they thus know about the religion they’ve picked given they haven’t spent that much time in it. There’s also the question of how far, historically, America possessed a free market of faiths. Despite constitutional protections, closed-off communities can be very intolerant of those of different faith – and there are many of these communities in inner America.

The contrast with Europe is also not, I think, a well-founded one. Despite the existence of an established Church of England, Britain for one enjoyed fairly extensive religious liberty after 1830 (the lifting of disabilities on Dissenters occurred in 1827-8 and on Catholics in 1829). After 1850, even Jews were allowed into Parliament (previously barred because an oath had to be sworn invoking the Christian God.) Yet it is precisely around this time – even among the pious middle classes – that religiosity went into decline in Britain. It hasn’t stopped since and Britain is now one of the more areligious countries in the world today. The religious resurgence of the late 18th and early 19th centuries which historians call the Evangelical Revival, occurred while the established Church held an unassailable position politically. (The movement had parallels in the same period in Germany, which had established churches, and USA, which didn’t.) France also has a tradition of religious toleration at least as old as America’s (dating back to the Revolution of 1789); it disestablished the churches (both Catholic and Protestant) in 1905. And freedom of worship does not seem to have stopped the secularisation process either.

The British and French examples suggest that there are many other, and probably much more significant factors at work behind secularisation or lack thereof. Some of them can be extremely mundane – the institutional reach of the church, for instance. The industrial cities of North England, and London, are historically less religious – largely because parish structure and church-building could not keep up with rapid population growth among their working classes in the 18th and 19th C. Sociologists suggest a correlation between economic wealth and state-provided welfare with lack of religiosity. (I.e. the richer and fairer a society is, the less religious, and America is an outlier because it has relatively fewer welfare provisions compared to Europe.) There’s also an interesting hypothesis attributing secularisation to ideological factors – what historian J.L. Althoz has termed ‘the warfare of conscience and theology’. I’ll discuss this another time because I think it has interesting implications for secularisation today.

But meanwhile, more things I don’t agree with!

America, then, is not a post-religious society—and cannot be as long as there are people in it, for faith is an intrinsic human impulse.

Two problems here. Firstly, there is a debate about whether or not faith is an ‘intrinsic human impulse’, and if it is, whether it can be overcome or not. The debate over this is by no means as settled as Meacham suggests. It is true that religion has (or at least seemed to have) been a historical fixture in all human societies, but this proves nothing. Indeed, the late 20th century is the first time in human history in which some human societies contain significant proportions of unbelievers: industrialised Japan, industrialised western Europe, and some of the former Warsaw Pact countries. Secondly, Meacham is confusing faith with (organised) religion. Eurobarometer surveys of Western European countries show a large number of respondents who believe, not in God, but in ‘a vague spirit or life-force’. Often the number is substantially larger than those believing in the Gods of organised religion. So it is entirely possible for people to be spiritual (in some sort of watered-down pantheism, or deism) without being ‘religious’ in the sense of taking part in the rituals and beliefs of a religious community. Or they may have faith in crackpot theories like crystal healing and spirit mediums. So it is entirely possible that America may become a post-religious society in the future, even without being depopulated. What is also interesting, however, is that it also seems to contradict Meacham’s mention of the ‘death of God’ movement within religion – but, as always, more in a later post, because it’s too interesting to be treated here.

American public life is neither wholly secular nor wholly religious but an ever-fluid mix of the two. History suggests that trouble tends to come when one of these forces grows too powerful in proportion to the other.

History suggests no such thing. Either that, or Meacham is careless with the use of the word ‘secular’. History suggests that trouble comes when a state tries to force a dogma – any dogma, religious, non-religious, or quasi-religious – down the throats of its population. This can range from the Cult of the Supreme Being (French revolutionary deism), to communism (too many examples to name), to National Socialism (Germany), to fundamentalist Shi’a Islam (Iran).

On the other hand, secularism – meaning the retreat of religious justifications and considerations from public life (especially education) and policy-making into the private sphere – has rarely been a bad thing for the societies involved. Prophecies of moral decay and societal collapse rarely come true. (For evidence, compare the high rates of social attainment in western European countries, with largely secular public spheres – in terms of education, death rates, pollution, social equality – in relation to America.)

So anyway, these are my responses to the article – for now. [To be continued...]

On cabals, the furious party spirit, and enthusiasm

‘Enthusiasm (n), Fancied inspiration; ‘a vain confidence of divine favour or communication’ (J.). In 18th c. often in vaguer sense: Ill-regulated or misdirected religious emotion, extravagance of religious speculation. arch.’ —-  (OED)

The past week or so has seen the bizarre spectacle of an American-style culture war unfold in Singapore. Bizarre because it is simply weird to hear the same American tropes being repeated in Singapore. Such tropes include: ‘What is happening in society is that we are redefining marriage, we are redefining families.’; ‘Are we going to have an entire generation of lesbians?’ and ‘[Homosexuals are] very often from families where you have abusive fathers’. These tropes have little justification in America and even less justification when transplanted to the local context: for instance, has anyone in Singapore even been seriously discussing the idea of legalising gay marriage? And these give rise to a strange illusion that the newspapers aren’t interviewing well-educated women engaged in reasoned and informed debate, but a flock of talking parrots belonging to Dr James Dobson.

Having said all that, it does seem to me that the ‘new guard’ within the AWARE ExCo has lost the war of words and the battle to define themselves. From the get-go they seem to have attempted to define themselves in ‘national’ terms: i.e. claim to be as representative as possible. This began with the AGM where they took power, with members refusing to answer or dismissing questions about their religious affiliation. Their plans were couched in as vague and as general a way as possible. This could possibly be because they really have no concrete plans, or because they were trying to sound as inclusive and representative as they could manage: hence the use of non-objectionable and consensus-building terms like ‘supporting women’, ‘women’s rights’, etc. And then on the Channel NewsAsia interview when the new president of AWARE spoke of being ‘pro-family, pro-women, and pro-Singapore’. And most recently, of course, came Dr Thio Su Mien’s claims to be a ‘feminist mentor’: which seemed to me a poor attempt at appropriating the language of AWARE to make the disruption in leadership seem, well, less disruptive.

(And yes, though YawningBread is right in saying that ‘pro-family’ is ‘fundie-speak’, it’s one of those polemical terms which are very useful in framing debates to appear as though the user has the benefit of majority support – after all, everyone wants to be pro-family, right? Ditto ‘pro-life’.)

Of late their strategy in framing this debate has taken on a slightly different nuance: instead of self-promotion, the rhetoric has shifted to an attempt to paint the ‘old guard’ of AWARE as a sectarian group working for the interests of an activist minority. Hence Dr Thio’s accusations of the organisation becoming ‘only very interested in lesbianism and the advancement of homosexuality’ and her call to reaffirm the ‘original mission’ of AWARE. New ExCo members have, essentially, backed this up.

And yet these efforts don’t seem to be succeeding. Perhaps it has to do with the rather negative media coverage (both old and new), which pointed out the religious affiliations of the new members, and their fervently anti-gay letters to the Forum. (Interestingly – and I may be wrong here – it seems taken for granted by the ST in their reporting of this affair that writing letters about the ‘Gay Threat to Society’ to the Forum is a purely sectarian practice, restricted to certain types of Christians.)

More likely, it has to do with the behaviour of the new ExCo since taking office: the exclusion of old ExCo members from decision-making and the press conference, changing locks at the office, the dismissal of old subcommittee members. Above all the revelation that Dr Thio played a role behind the scenes makes the whole affair seem like a sordid conspiracy.

And so ultimately the impression created by media reports and internet blogging is that of a secretive cabal of religious enthusiasts, animated by a furious party spirit: an essentially sectarian faction which has captured control of a ‘national’ organisation led by an old guard which – despite losing a democratic election – was more broadly representative of the concerns of a society which remains emphatically multi-religious and essentially tolerant. A letter to the Straits Times from a ‘conservative Asian family man’ states, ‘The new leaders are largely mono-religious and appear to hold singularly exclusive views about religion, social and family behaviour and sexual mores.’ The attitudes expressed here towards the new AWARE ExCo are suggestive – and other letters have stated similar opinions. And hence, because it has lost the battle to define itself as national and representative, the ‘new guard’ has essentially lost all credibility to govern an organisation which was founded to be secular and inclusive.

And this impression, I suspect, is not too far from the truth of the matter.

Has any good, then, come from this? It is possible that AWARE’s credibility – as an organisation – will probably be damaged beyond repair by the whole fiasco. Also, there is no guarantee that the vote of no confidence will pass. But there are some grounds for optimism. Firstly, the popular reaction has been rather gratifying. Secondly, and more importantly, an attempt by Singapore’s version of the religious right to stake a claim to speak for majority of Singaporeans in open battle seems to have failed. (Though I do know I am basing this claim on rather thin evidence – only time will tell.) With any luck this fiasco will have a lasting effect: that from now on, people will stop short and be sceptical about the claims of any sect or faction to speak for our ‘conservative majority’.

Holocaust denial

This is a slightly edited cross post from k-a-i. So the news is a bit old and some of you may have seen this before.

The context: Pope Benedict XVI has lifted the excommunications on four bishops belonging to an ultra conservative Catholic organisation, the Society of St. Pius X, who had broken canon law in the past. One of these bishops is a Holocaust-denier:

I’ve never studied the holocaust, but this video absolutely pisses me off. Several things to note:

1. He starts off on the wrong note almost immediately – fallacies of strawman + excluded middle. People don’t claim that ALL the 6 million were gassed – a good number died from starvation, disease, forced labour, or shooting. And the choice is not between ’6 million gassed’, and ‘none gassed’. Even if there were no gas chambers, or the gas chambers didn’t work as efficiently as claimed, there could still have been a lot of people who died in Nazi hands or because of Nazi actions – enough to justify the term ‘Holocaust’.

2. ‘The most serious of [the revisionists] conclude that between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews perished’.
Personally I believe that historical ‘fact’ is a misnomer – all ‘facts’ (or, as Williamson prefers to put it, ‘historical truth’) are simply probabilistic models to account for patterns we find in historical sources. There are naturally other possible models for any pattern in our sources, but often we (try to) pick the most probable one. For instance, if we find all the London newspapers from 1901 announcing the death of Queen Victoria, one model which would account for this would be that she did, in fact, die in 1901. Of course, another model which would fit would be one which suggested that Victoria had died in 1900 and that all the newspapers had covered up the fact for a whole year; and yet another would be that all extant newspaper clippings are in fact fabrications from the 1950′s made as a practical joke. But even these are, prima facie, (much) less plausible.

Add onto the scales other lines of evidence and one realises that the alternative models become increasingly much less probable – so much so that it becomes perverse to accept them. In fact, the lines of evidence in this case converge very neatly. Memoirists, diarists, letter-writers – some of whom are close to the queen – also record the death of Victoria in 1901. There are medical records which corroborate this. There are photographs taken of her funeral procession, a sermon was given and recorded at the service. More indirectly, coins and stamps from 1902 onwards stop featuring the bust of Victoria; Hansard records that the 1902 session of parliament is opened by King Edward VII. It becomes ludicrous – still plausible, of course, but very highly improbable – to assert that together with newspaper editors (or document forgers), letter-writers, coin minters, stamp issuers, and the editors of Hansard are in together on a gigantic conspiracy, a claim for which there is no evidence whatsoever (a few conspiratorial letters would be useful to establish the case!)

Back to the Holocaust. The 200,000 figure is claimed by David Irving (‘revisionist historian’ or ‘Holocaust denier’ depending on your political sensibilities), which is much smaller than estimates made by other historians, is based on evidence such as the Auschwitz Death Books, the records of the SS which ran the camps (and recently released from Soviet archives.) The Auschwitz Death Books record only 69,000 deaths. A figure of 200,000 is thus, of course, an entirely plausible model, extrapolated to account for the numbers as recorded in such sources.

The problem is that this particular line of evidence does not converge with others. The estimate of 6 million is made from, among other things, a comparison of pre- and post-war population census figures, which suggest that at some point between 1939 and 1945, a great number of Jews disappeared from the administrative documentation. Where did all these Jews go? Natural deaths, deaths from the war, emigration, conversion en masse to Christianity cannot account entirely for the disappearance of 3/4 of Europe’s Jewish population without leaving traces in other records (for instance, customs and immigration records, census records in other countries, parish records of baptisms and easter communicants). So unless it simply assumes that governmental statistics of different sorts across a range of countries are just dead wrong in this period, any model proposing that only 200,000 Jews died because of the Nazis in those years would have to square with these unfortunate facts. If the Nazis only killed 200,000, then who – or what – caused the others to disappear? This does not even take into account other Nazi records, especially on deportations, documents written by the Jews themselves (Anne Frank’s diary?), or documents (such as speeches, memos, Mein Kampf, etc.) which expound on the intent of the Nazi leadership to exterminate the Jews in a Final Solution, all of which suggest very strongly (almost to the point of certainty) that the Nazis were responsible for their disappearance. other models remain possible explanations for the data (e.g. a great plague; the missing people running into hiding underground and founding a subterranean civilisation dedicated to the destruction of the world above) but these are extraordinary claims for which there is no additional evidence, and ought to be dismissed until explicitly supporting evidence is produced.

Such contradictions behoove one to ask questions on the reliability of specific sources. the Death Books, when examined, seem to be documents which, while valuable in their own right, cannot be used to establish the total numbers of murdered jews in auschwitz. A survivor has stated that only persons destined to do any forced labour were included in the SS registers; the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess’s memoirs suggest that majority of people are also not recorded by the SS, and that the ’cause of death’ was often inaccurate. On the other hand, we know that government census figures, while imperfect (census takers may miss out some people, they may be forced to rely on estimates in some areas, not all census records survive to present day), are important to the governments which take them – for tax purposes, to formulate social policy, etc. All this would imply that governments actually took care to make them as accurate as they could. Did the Death Books serve a comparable purpose which would necessitate the same need for accuracy? Furthermore, these documents are themselves quite incomplete: the SS destroyed many records in the final days of the war.

3. ‘There were no gas chambers.’
First, dealing with the claim that Leuchter (of the ‘Leuchter Report’) is an ‘expert on gas chambers’: he is not even an engineer. (Apologies: the article is an old one and you can only read the summary for free.)

Today the camps are all in ruins. The substance of this claim depends on the lack of absolutely foolproof physical evidence that the gas chambers once existed. but then again, the study of history is never foolproof; it depends upon the chance survival of fragments and relics of the past. some of the ruins which do, in fact, contain poison gas residue, are dismissed by ‘revisionists’ as delousing chambers, used for pest extermination purposes. I’m no expert on the technical claims made by Williamson (that the ceilings were not high enough to expel the poisonous gases), but personally, I don’t really think it’s an important point.

Mainly this is because such a claim ignores or dismisses evidence to the contrary such as eyewitness testimony from Jewish survivors, the people who ran the camps, and allied soldiers. Now eyewitness testimony is problematic. Memory is fallible and selective, testimony is necessarily hugely subjective. people lie, distort, and exaggerate. However, the stories are rather consistent and corroborate each other, even when the informants have no reason to do so – i.e. Jews and Nazis say pretty similar things. (Additionally, why would Nazis lie at the Nuremberg trials in order to be found guilty and punished?) Consistency, naturally, suggests either reliability, or conspiracy – once again there are two plausible models to account for a pattern in the evidence. of course it is possible that survivors, interrogators of war criminals, and allied soldiers were in cahoots to make their accounts resemble each other. But once again, not only is this improbable, it would mean making an additional claim for which there is no evidence. (still no conspiratorial letters!)

There are also other kinds of evidence: photos and videos taken in the immediate aftermath of the war, building plans, remains of poison gas canisters. There is also the Gerstein Report. Each line of evidence can be, on its own, dismissed. And of course there are problems with all the sources. Taken cumulatively, however they build a very strong case. It is therefore perverse, I think, to claim that gas chambers for killing people did not exist.

Another big objection I have is that Williamson’s claims simply invert the process of historical explanation. On a most basic level (in my opinion, anyway) the work of an historian consists of taking into account all the biases, inaccuracies, falsehoods of all his sources – the sources are cross-checked against each other, the possible intentions of their authors examined, they are read in terms of how plausible their claims are from what we already know of the event – and then building a plausible model which takes into account as many of these sources as possible, and usefully explains why they are the way they are.

One does not (or, at any rate, should not) claim that because some supposed engineer cannot think of a way to explain how the gas chambers work, they cannot possibly exist, therefore the Nazis cannot have killed so many Jews, and therefore the Holocaust should be placed in scare quotes every time it is mentioned. Such reasoning would assume that all other lines of evidence should be dismissed, even when they are broadly regarded as reliable and consistent, and converge on a single explanatory model. This is almost akin to saying that because current scientific models of powered flight show that the bumblebee is not aerodynamic enough to fly, it cannot possibly fly. But bumblebees are observed to fly all the time: it does not mean these observers are frauds, or lunatics, or that bees perform miracles routinely. It means that the scientists are wrong. Similarly, just because Leuchter cannot figure out how the gas chambers work does not prove that the gas chambers the Nazis built were technically unworkable, nor does it imply that all the eyewitnesses were lying and all the building plans were forged. It simply means that Leuchter is mistaken. His ignorance of how the gas chambers actually worked cannot be used to justify the opinion that there were no mass gassings and that the Holocaust did not occur. (a similar tactic is used by creationists who point to gaps in biological knowledge in an attempt to attack evolutionary theory – maybe the subject of a post for another day :p)

4. Religion and anti-semitism
There is something hugely ironic – or massively hypocritical – about a bishop from a recidivist organisation within the catholic church invoking historical evidence as some sort of holy grail in the quest for ‘historical truth’. This can only be pseudo-scepticism – the same man who insists on the highest (and the most impracticeable and absurd) standards of proof for the logistical details of gas chamber operation will, on sundays, ask his flock to accept as ‘historical truth’ dogmas such as the perpetual virginity of Mother Mary without a shred of supporting historical evidence.

Williamson is obviously an articulate and intelligent man. He’s done his research. (hands up – who’s ever even heard of the Leuchter report before?) He cannot possibly be saying all this because he is ignorant, stupid, or lazy. It’s hard, therefore, to avoid the niggling suspicion that he is simply wilfully blind to the historical evidence piled up against his opinions and the historical consensus which has formed behind that evidence: evidence which is most definitely not hard to find. I wrote this short essay with the help of an hour or two on Google and Wikipedia and some of the stuff footnoted on Wiki articles. In this case, ‘revisionist history’ seems to become a pseudo-intellectual front for simple anti-semitism – an accusation that he will be hard-pressed to refute.

5. Some final points
The figure of 6 million is necessarily ballpark – no one knows (or can know) the precise number of dead. The absolute lower limit is 4 million (victims whose names are known to the yad vashem museum in israel) and the absolute upper limit is 8 million (the population of Jews in Europe.) Most estimates made by historians put the death toll between 5+ million and 6+ million.

This leads to a larger point: there are necessarily limits to historical knowledge. We do not have absolute certainty that any past event occurred; nor will we ever know, in full, the details of how they happened or how people experienced them. the degree of certainty decreases over time: people die off, memories fade, documents get lost. Epistemologically, therefore, much historical explanation is conjecture. But there are good conjectural models – which explain the patterns in as broad a range of sources as possible – and bad ones, which do not. Pretending that a bad conjecture is a good one – and that it more accurately ‘captures the past’ – is dishonest.

Also, when I say that historical explanations are conjectural, it does not mean that i expect the current orthodoxy on the Holocaust to be overturned any time soon. Of course it is possible that the Holocaust did not happen. It is also possible that the world was created last Wednesday, with all our memories before that date implanted in us; it is also possible that we are all brains in a vat. Even then, Holocaust denial is more improbable than both the omphalos hypothesis and the Matrix, because, by definition, there can be no evidence for or against those two scenarios; whereas the claims of holocaust denial seem to have been falsified – if we accept as efficacious the efforts of the vast majority of historians to ensure the veracity, reliability and consistency of their source material – by the current state of research.

Holocaust ‘revisionism’ is the practice of pointing out to small gaps in our knowledge – e.g. the apparent insufficiency of the carrying capacity of lifts in concentration camp crematoria to handle the supposed numbers of people killed, the technical ‘impossibility’ of gas chambers – in an attempt to discredit useful and largely consistent explanatory models. These represent not flaws in the existing explanatory framework, but the natural limits of existing historical knowledge. Once again: just because we do not know precisely how something worked, does not mean it could not have happened.

Revisionist history in many other fields is often creative, exciting and fruitful, and occasionally overturn existing consensus on historical issues. A good example would be Alfred Cobban’s work on the French Revolution, which showed that, contrary to marxist models of the revolution as a bourgeois-capitalist takeover, the French revolutionaries were largely lawyers, professionals, priests and bureaucrats. Most revisionism is part of the normal process of academic debate. In general, revisionism becomes successful when it points out explanatory deficiencies in existing models over a wide range of sources, and/or proposes new models which explain the patterns in sources better. Good revisionist history does not depend on ignorance or misrepresentation to make its point.

I do not think that Holocaust denial should be a crime, mainly because it allows deniers to claim victimhood (and/or martyrdom) and insinuate that the orthodox interpretation is afraid of refutation. It is not. Instead, deniers should be allowed to express their views in order that they be effectively refuted.

Lastly, people who make the whole thing into an issue of political correctness are really also missing the point.

Revivification?

Ok, I was struck by a random fancy recently to start blogging again. I really haven’t done this for years and years – my last personal blog was started in JC1. It was on pitas and embarrassingly angsty (the background was all-grey, had a greyed-out picture of the ruins of Palmyra, and the title was taken from the last lines of Shelley’s Ozymandias). Thank goodness I’ve forgotten the URL, and I sure hope it stays forgotten.

Many things have since changed. I still think Ozymandias is a terribly good poem though.

So anyway, God knows how long this particular blog will last: I am notoriously short on stamina in all senses of the word. I’ll use this space to ramble on about anything that strikes my fancy. Those who know me will know that I only have a few obsessions (cf. this), and I can talk endlessly about them. And who knows, the writing may help keep my mind sharp(ish) in the long and terrible years ahead. (Yes, I know it’s not the same as writing an essay every week, but surely it must have some similar effects!)

Anyway, this will probably be mostly about the use and abuse of history, with music thrown in on the side. But it’ll probably degenerate into something else, as such things tend to. We’ll see. Meanwhile, you can check out my blogroll!